The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  Frieda ate bubblegum for breakfast and Leonard finished the chocolate in the icebox in full view of Juliet but she said nothing, not even when he declared, ‘Well, I hope this doesn’t give me a tummy-ache or upset the old kishkies.’ By three o’clock they were starting to worry. Frieda wasn’t sure whether in the list of telephone numbers their grandmother had provided there was one to call in the event of sudden craziness. But at half past four Juliet roused herself and insisted that they all shower and be ready to leave in less than an hour. Relieved at her mother’s return to reality, Frieda was preparing to make a fuss when she noticed that Juliet’s face was pale with anger. Not the kind of anger caused by Leonard leaving a library book outside in the rain or even the sort Frieda had ignited when she’d borrowed Juliet’s expensive face powder and spilled the tub all over the bedroom carpet. This was a different shade of anger, quiet and adult. When Leonard reached for her hand, Frieda let him take it, even though she wasn’t a kid any more and his fingers were candy sticky.

  They climbed into the Plymouth, neither of the children daring to ask where they were going, and drove inland through streets of low-rise Lego houses. Juliet halted the car, turned off the engine and sat twisting her watchstrap. Leonard nudged Frieda, pointing out the shop front opposite: Gorgeous George’s Glasses.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Juliet with sudden resolve.

  She marched both children across the road and, avoiding the front door to the shop, led them up a narrow alley to the rear of the house and to a second door. The lights were on and through the open window drifted the smell of roasting chicken fat which mingled with the sound of urgent baseball commentary from a wireless set. Juliet reached for the bell. There was shuffling from within and then the wireless fell silent. Vera opened the door.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Molnár,’ said Juliet. ‘Where’s George?’

  Vera held a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Her face showed no surprise, her eyebrows painted in a perfect immovable arch, but the hand holding the cigarette trembled so that ash spilled onto her bare feet.

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  Frieda and Leonard followed their mother, tripping into a small, untidy kitchen, every surface littered with cookery books, chopping boards, bowls filled with coloured shells and glossy apples. Piles of grey laundry lay heaped on the counter – jockstraps and socks drying over a packet of matzo meal.

  ‘Jerry!’ yelled Vera.

  There was the squeal of sneakers on lino and then the red-haired boy joined them in the kitchen. His mouth formed an ‘O’ of surprise when he saw the Montagues, and he glanced at his mother, who smiled serenely and poked in her purse with one hand, not surrendering her glass of wine or cigarette.

  ‘Jerry, we’ve guests for dinner. Pop to the store and get some ice cream? And I’m not sure there’s enough chicken. Pick up a pizza too.’ She handed him a rolled-up bill. ‘Take the children with you.’

  Frieda scowled at the word ‘children’ but trailed outside after Jerry and Leonard nevertheless. They walked in silence for a few minutes, each sensing that something significant was happening back at the house, but none of them quite sure how to address it.

  ‘How are those paper airplanes working out?’ asked Jerry at last.

  ‘Super,’ said Leonard, perking up.

  Jerry laughed and then lapsed into silence. ‘You wanna see something cool?’ he said after a pause.

  Leonard and Frieda nodded – of course they did. Jerry led them along a side street. After ten minutes a red sign flashed before them, ‘The Studio Drive-Thru Movie Theater’. He halted, hands in his pockets.

  ‘We don’t have any money,’ confessed Frieda.

  ‘Or a car,’ added Leonard helpfully.

  Jerry grinned. ‘Don’t need ’em. We’re not going in the front.’

  The houses gave way to a row of faded shop fronts – a pizza parlour, drugstore, nail salon and a large parking lot. Jerry marched to the back of the lot and, checking over his shoulder, scrambled up a bank. With a strong freckled arm he hauled up the others. There was a high fence, but with familiar confidence he kicked at a panel and squeezed through, Frieda and Leonard following close behind. Jerry leaned back against the wooden panels and gave a happy sigh.

  ‘See,’ he said, waving his hand like a prince showing off his kingdom.

  The setting sun ignited the clouds a red as bright as their grandmother’s electric fire. The glow spread across the cars parked nose to tail, the sun flashing off a hundred windshields. At the front was erected a vast movie screen. Jerry studied it for a second and then sniffed.

  ‘Saw this last week. Was Okay. Kinda dull. Though she does take her top off at the end.’

  He sprawled on a scrubby patch of grass, the others flopping down beside him.

  ‘I can watch anything for free this way,’ he said. ‘Saw West Side Story and The Guns of Navarone and everything with John Wayne.’

  Leonard nodded his approval but Frieda wrinkled her nose.

  ‘What’s the point of seeing West Side Story without the music?’ she demanded.

  Jerry grinned his milk-white grin. ‘I got a portable radio. My dad gave it to me. I tune it in to the movie theatre and I sit up here and watch the movie and listen along and it costs me bupkis.’

  Leonard stared at him, awed at his ingenuity with the portable radio, but most of all jealous that his father had given it to him.

  • • •

  Vera swept the laundry off the kitchen table and onto the floor and started laying places for dinner. Juliet counted five settings.

  ‘When will George be back?’ she asked.

  Vera closed the cutlery drawer.

  ‘Hell if I know.’

  ‘No more silly lies,’ snapped Juliet. ‘Where is George Montague?’

  Vera sank onto a chair. The oven clock ticked and the soup gurgled on the stove. She drained her wine glass and took a breath, her accent growing stronger under duress. ‘I don’t know any George Montague, but George Molnár is gone. Disappeared three years ago.’

  Juliet closed her eyes and felt a weariness seep into her soul like damp. She’d come all this way to find him, only to discover he’d vanished again.

  ‘Do you know where he went?’

  Vera shook her head. ‘He was here one day and then he wasn’t. Took some money. Quite a lot of money. And a photo of Jerry and a painting of a little girl.’

  Juliet’s heart beat a little faster.

  ‘A painting?’

  ‘Yes. We used to have it in the living room. She had dark eyes and brown hair and a naughty look that made me think that she was often sent to bed without any dinner. George never told me who the picture was of. I never asked but I guessed. I liked the picture. I liked it very much.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Juliet. ‘He stole it when he left us.’

  Vera stretched her legs, a bare toe wiggling through a hole in her stocking. ‘The picture was very valuable?’

  ‘Quite valuable.’

  ‘Then I suppose that’s why he took it. But so long as he was here, he didn’t sell it, which was strange. Expensive things didn’t last long with George.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Juliet. She supposed she ought to tell Vera the unsavoury truth. ‘I’m afraid when George came to California and married you, he was still married to me.’

  She looked to see what effect this was having on the other woman, but Vera stared back at her, perfectly impassive.

  ‘He never divorced me, Vera. We’re both married to George,’ said Juliet slowly, uncertain that she had understood.

  Vera studied Juliet for a minute and then smiled, not unkindly. ‘Yes, we are both married to George, but what you don’t understand is that I am his first wife, not his second.’

  Juliet felt suddenly very cold, even though the mist and grease from the roasting chicken was slicking the windows with steam.

  Vera conjured with her cigarette. ‘I mean that purely in a practical sense. I married Georgy Mol
nár on 1 August 1939 in the Rumbach Street synagogue in Budapest. I was already six months’ pregnant with our daughter Ana. Tamas arrived the following year. Tamas had the same blue eyes as Leonard but he did not need spectacles.’

  Juliet blinked and swallowed at the lump in her throat. In her mind she could hear her father’s voice – spectacles were a blessing, a talisman against harm.

  ‘We were happy enough for a while. Georgy and I always fight. But the babies kept us busy and we were as happy as most people.’

  ‘And Jerry?’

  ‘Is the youngest. He remembers nothing of before in Hungary. Thank God.

  ‘In 1944 they took Georgy away with the other men. I guessed he was probably dead. The children and I stayed in the ghetto. We managed for a while and then we didn’t.’

  Juliet watched Vera like a painter, trying to decipher her face. Lines around her eyes, her teeth perfect white. Too white. Juliet realised that they were dentures. Vera noticed her staring and clicked her tongue under the teeth, lifted up the bottom set to reveal her gums, raw and pink as an earthworm.

  ‘There was not enough to eat in the ghetto,’ said Vera. ‘I got sick and one morning I got out of bed and spat out my teeth one by one like orange pips into a bowl.’

  Without her teeth, Vera looked suddenly old. Then she slid them back in place and was herself again, calm and rouged.

  ‘What happened to Tamas and Ana?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘Typhus. Perhaps it was for the best. To die in their mother’s arms, nursed and loved. What came later was worse.’

  These unknown children were the brothers and sister of her own children. George had gone but the rest of them remained connected like a chain of paper dolls.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ She swallowed tears, sensing that they would only irritate Vera.

  ‘You ask, so I tell you,’ said Vera, her voice flat. She sucked hard on her cigarette. ‘I have Jerry. We have a nice house, enough to eat. Good friends. I listen when they complain about their husbands. This American life is not so bad.’

  ‘But George found you again?’

  ‘Yes. I thought he was dead. Then one day in 1952 he comes back. He was in England and heard we were in California and he comes and finds us.’

  Juliet blinked. ‘I always thought he disappeared because of some gambling debt. But it wasn’t that at all. He left us for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vera.

  She offered no apology. Juliet supposed Vera did not consider it her fault that George abandoned Juliet and his other children. He chose Jerry over Leonard and Frieda.

  ‘It’s stupid really, but I thought he left us because of money, but he didn’t. He left us for you.’

  ‘Not for me. For the little ones. He wanted Ana and Tamas. But there was only Jerry and me.’

  In the silence that followed, Juliet tried to imagine explaining Vera to her parents and laughed. She would tell them that George was not at the optician’s in Culver City and insist they mustn’t search any more. How could she tell them the truth? George left me and went to America to return to his first wife. She wasn’t dead. George and I were never really married at all. My children are bastards. Mamzerin. Juliet sighed and her laughter subsided like the tide. She wasn’t an aguna or a chained woman or a living widow, she was something worse – a bigamist and an adulteress.

  • • •

  Leonard and Frieda meandered back to the house. Jerry held the pizza box, doling out slices. At the end of the street, all three paused by silent consent and sat on the kerb.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Jerry.

  The topic had been raised at last. To Leonard’s surprise, it was Frieda who answered.

  ‘Well, we came here looking for our dad. Our mum thinks we don’t know. Do you want to know what I think?’

  Jerry nodded.

  ‘I think our mum thinks that your mum stole him or is having an affair with him or something ’

  Frieda spoke at great speed and with great confidence, pronouncing ‘affair’ with what she believed to be a French accent.

  ‘My dad’s gone too,’ Jerry said, handed out the last slices of pizza.

  ‘But the radio?’ said Leonard.

  ‘He gave it to me before he left. I think he would have taken it with him. It was real expensive but I was at the movies and I had it on me so he couldn’t. I don’t know if I miss him or I hate him.’

  The words tumbled out of him, a confession of feelings that he only knew he possessed as he spoke them aloud. Leonard and Frieda carefully said nothing so as to spare him the humiliation of their sympathy.

  The three children ate their pizza side by side in the growing darkness. Leonard studied Jerry. He looked very like the newspaper cutting of George Montague. Jerry chuckled at something Frieda had said, and Leonard watched him and felt something familiar and buried stirred inside. He remembered a man’s laugh and a pair of dark eyes. He had the strangest feeling that Jerry was his brother. They sat in the gloom, the streetlights pinging on in a burst of pale light, with only Leonard guessing that they were all missing the same man. He wanted to tell Jerry but he wasn’t quite sure how, and then Frieda and Jerry were arguing about who looked better on horseback, Gary Cooper or John Wayne, and so Leonard finished his pizza and wiped his fingers along his trousers and said nothing.

  Tibor finished his portrait of Juliet the day the Montagues were due to catch the bus back to New York. He suggested they have a little goodbye party and official unveiling on the beach. Juliet and the children dressed up in the portrait’s honour – even Frieda humming as she donned her favourite spotted sundress that showed off her tan. They wandered along the beach in the afternoon sunshine, watching pelicans scoop up fish in vast, prehistoric beaks. This was a magic holiday land and Leonard struggled to think of Venice existing along the same timeline as Mulberry Avenue, Chislehurst. It had been the best summer ever – full of intrigue, adventure and ice cream and to top it off, he was certain he’d grown almost an inch.

  Frieda was equally content, though she’d have preferred to be taking back with her the story of some rosy summer romance. On the other hand, she decided that she could just make one up and no one at school would ever know. She resolved to fine-tune the details on the journey back to England.

  Tibor waved as he saw them coming. He was in a cream linen suit and clutched a bag of goodies. The portrait sat on her easel, covered with a cloth.

  ‘Here, have a little something,’ he said, passing glasses of orange juice to the children. He gave another to Juliet, tipping in a snifter of something else.

  ‘A cocktail,’ he said, when she raised an eyebrow.

  ‘To friendships and sunshine,’ said Tibor, clinking his glass against Juliet’s.

  Leonard grinned. Grandma had always been very clear that it was common to clink.

  Tibor nodded his approval. ‘He’s got it. And I have a something for you.’ He delved into his bag and retrieved a brand-new set of pencils and a bound sketchpad of good, thick paper. ‘You’ve the knack for drawing. Maybe it’ll only be a hobby, maybe something more, but you might like to find out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Leonard, taking the presents reverently in both hands.

  ‘That’s terribly kind, Tibor.’ Juliet smiled. ‘Can I see my picture now?’

  They huddled around the easel as, with a magician’s flick, Tibor removed the cloth. A naked woman with cherry-bun breasts soared across the sky above Venice Beach, her hair rippling out behind her. The sky was August blue; the green sea thrashed below. The woman’s eyes were closed, perhaps against the glare, but Juliet could tell that she looked happy. The portrait leaked happiness. And yet there was one disappointment. Juliet felt it rumble in her belly.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Tibor, for once wanting an opinion.

  ‘The woman is me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She looks – sorry, I look just like all the other women you’ve painted. The same smile, the same flying hair and the same heart-sh
aped chin.’

  Tibor shook his head. ‘No. All the other women look like you. I’d been painting you for many years before I met you on the beach.’

  Juliet met his gaze. He silently tipped his hat. She couldn’t tell whether it was true or not. She wasn’t sure whether it mattered.

  ‘I love the picture,’ she declared, realising as she said it that she really did. ‘I can’t wait to show it in London. How would you feel about me selling your work in my gallery?’

  ‘I never sell.’

  ‘But you’ll sell me this one?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Of course not. I never sell a picture. I love them all. How can I give her away?’ he asked, pointing at the portrait on the easel.

  The afternoon was ruined. Of course she’d presumed that she’d take the picture home with her. Frowning, she tried to recall if it had ever been discussed and reluctantly concluded that it had not.

  ‘Now it’s time for cake,’ said Tibor.

  • • •

  At eight o’clock Juliet walked the children back to the apartment to finish their packing, returning to have one final drink with Tibor and say goodbye before the taxi came. It was quiet on the beach apart from the rush of the tide. The sea swallowed the traffic and city noise in its roar. She searched the gloom for Tibor, but he wasn’t there. The cocktail had gone to her head and the sound of the waves swirled in her ears. The painting sat on the easel, dusk turning the colours into silver and grey.

  Her lips parted in a private half-smile. George had stolen her portrait and a piece of her remained lost. I won’t leave another part of myself behind. I won’t have another man keep a little piece of me. She looked around again, but Tibor was still nowhere to be seen. She tried to tell herself that he expected her to do this, that he’d disappeared to make it easy for her. She seized the painting and ran back along the path, her plimsolls slapping on the asphalt.